Better Odds Than Yesterday
The town is burning, and my first thought, God help me, is that I've seen worse.
My second thought is that there are seven of them down there- seven Maws working the market square like they own it, and the Sanctioned squad that should have arrived forty minutes ago clearly hasn't, because the bell is still ringing and nobody rings the bell when trained fighters are already on the ground. You ring the bell when you're out of options. You ring it when the thing eating your neighbours has started on the grain store, and you've run out of anything better to throw at it.
I stop at the ridge and count properly. Six large, one small, the small one tucked behind the burning grain store where it thinks nobody's looking. The small ones are always the ones that get you. Everyone watches the teeth they can see.
I shift my pack and go down the hill.
There's a specific quality to the Resonance a Maw pack produces when it's working coordinated. Most people don't notice because most people aren't reading frequency, they're watching jaws and trying not to die. But I've been in the Ashwild for fifteen years and the Ashwild will teach you to read what's underneath a thing or it will kill you, and I am....despite considerable effort on its part, not dead. What I'm reading right now is wrong. Maws in a standard breach pattern scatter. They feed opportunistically. They don't sweep.
These seven are sweeping. Left to right, methodical, moving toward the eastern end of the square like they've been given an address.
I note this and keep moving.
The gate's hanging open, whoever was supposed to man it either ran or went to help, which means I walk straight through into the smoke and noise of a town in the middle of something it wasn't built for. Three buildings down already. The heat hits first, then the smell, which is the kind of thing you stop being able to describe after you've smelled it once.
There's a woman and two children pinned behind an overturned merchant cart near the east wall. The cart's iron-banded oak, decent weight, would slow a Maw down for maybe twenty more seconds. One of the large ones has clocked the heartbeats behind it and is turning.
I drop my pack. Inside it: two weeks of provisions, a set of teaching tools wrapped in oilskin that belonged to someone I love and haven't heard from in three months, and three sealed letters I haven't let myself open yet. I leave it on the ground and feel bad about that for exactly the time it takes me to cover the distance between me and the Maw, which is not long.
People who've only seen Sanctioned fighters work think Resonance combat looks like weather. Big dramatic output, light and noise, the kind of thing you could paint. The Scholar used to call that approach expensive and vain, which was the Scholar's way of saying wrong. What I do looks like nothing from the outside. I put my hand to the back of the Maw's neck and I find the frequency it exists at, the specific vibration that organizes it into the shape of a thing that is alive, and I disagree with it. That's the closest I can get in any language I've found. I find the argument and I take both sides at once, and the Maw stops being organized, which is the same as stopping being.
It doesn't dissolve dramatically. It just stops.
The woman behind the cart is staring at me. Her children have buried their faces in her coat.
"East gate," I tell her. "Go now."
She goes.
The next three take about two minutes between them because they're spread across the square and I have to move fast. The crowd on the wall has gone completely silent, which is its own kind of noise. I can feel their watching the way you feel a held breath. I don't look up. I work through the pack in order of proximity and threat level and try to think about nothing except the next one, which is easier than it sounds when your body knows what it's doing.
Five down. The juvenile by the grain store tries to run when I come near, bolts down a side alley, and I chase it four buildings' worth before I can close the distance. Annoying. My boots are going to smell like char for a week.
Six down.
Seven is the problem.
I stand in the square and sweep frequency and don't find it where it should be. It's gone still. Not fled, I'd feel the retreat. Gone still, which Maws do not do. Maws are not patient animals. They do not wait.
This one is waiting.
It takes me ninety seconds to find it: pressed against the east wall of the square, motionless, tucked into the shadow of the blacksmith's shed like it was told to stay. Scout class, I see now that I'm close. Narrow build, built for speed over damage. And around its neck, on a thin leather cord, a collar.
I crouch down and read it.
Craft cipher, the expensive kind. Someone spent real money and real skill on this inscription, which means whoever sent this pack isn't working out of the Ashwild's rough edge. This is city work. The kind with resources and patience behind it. I read the top line first.
Property of the Veilwright. Return if found.
I read it again. Then I read the second line, smaller, different hand entirely, and something cold drops through the center of my chest and keeps falling.
Ashwild cipher. My mentors' notation. The private language of three people and a girl in a wilderness that wasn't on any map.
run. not home.
I read it three more times. Reading it more doesn't change it. I stand up.
The crowd is starting to move off the wall, I can hear feet on the stairs, voices getting closer, someone shouting what sounds like who was that, where did she go. I have approximately forty seconds before someone rounds the corner of the blacksmith's shed and finds me crouching over a collared Maw with my mentors' handwriting around its neck.
I look east. The direction the pack was sweeping before I stopped them. The Solé family estate sits at the east end of town, I grew up in that house for four years before I stopped growing up in it. The second floor is lit. My father's study window, facing the square.
The Maws weren't attacking the town.
They were going somewhere. They had an address.
I pick up my pack from the center of the square, nod at a man who's staring at me with both hands pressed over his mouth, and walk east before anyone can get close enough to ask my name.
The door opens before I knock.
